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Topic: The Board Game Thread (Read 92426 times)

I did get the Hellboy board game at the weekend which looks very nice. I'd seen the Kickstarter but decided I really didn't have the time/space/need for another board game, but it turns out a couple of lunchtime pints before stopping into the board game shop was all we needed to put all that pesky rationalizing to one side and just get it.

Didn't realize it existed so have just ordered Mass Effect Monopoly. I don't play much Monopoly but I've always thought the right license makes a world of difference for me getting into something like that (I always like Star Wars Monopoly and Mass Effect Risk) so looking forward to playing it reskinned with my favourite game franchise.

Also looked into buying the Big Trouble In Little China board game and that thing goes for almost £200 these days so I guess the lesson is to buy these games before they go out of print! The Thing board game I got from Mondo also seems to be going for silly money so glad I jumped on that on release.

For the uninitiated it's an epic, sprawling, survival horror co-op game set in a grim-dark world heavily inspired by the Berserk manga. You have a settlement of survivors who send out a group of 4 hunters to track and kill and hideous beast each year. Success leads to resource drops which allows you to craft better gear, failure leads to hideous death. Every 4-5 years a Nemesis shows up to challenge the settlement and slaughter your survivors. It's brutal and unrelenting with plenty of nethack style gotchas and random oh dear you rolled a 1 you die horribly moments.

I presume it's me, since it's very popular, but KD always seems to me to be unnecessarily horrible. Lots of willies and boobs and distended entrails in the service of, what, unpleasantness?

I say "it's not you, it's me" because it does appears to gel with a thriving strand in TT gaming - various RPG-advice tubers seem to have a similar aesthetic, for instance I recently stopped watching the very interesting Dungeon Craft channel (hosted by the affable Professor Dungeon Master!) when the hobgoblins in his updated Keep on the Borderlands campaign turned out to reproduce by raping human women who they kept imprisoned and pregnant. Once i saw that, i noticed he was endorsing RPG books by dodgy characters like Zak Smith, and well, no. And it's not the first channel I've bailed on for similar.

I mean, OK, it's make believe and D&D always had its teenage pervert side, but we're adults now, no? Do we really want to be fantasising about interspecies rape dungeons? Well, like I say, not averse to bit of grimdark, but not for me.

I don't mean to lump KD and its adherents in with that sort of nonsense from a position of ignorance, but from the outside that's how it *looks* and it puts me right off.

I played Keep on the Borderlands back in the day, and then reflected years later that the adventurers were basically committing genocide against multiple populations of non-human. (Well, they didn't have to kill them all, but if you wanted loot for that shiny new armour...)

Kingdom Death's aesthetic is definitely not for everyone - personally I thought the SU&SD review was a little harsh but then a survival horror game like this is somewhat outside their comfort zone so it wasn't overly surprising.

In its defence I'd say that despite the Berserk influence (cos lets face it that manga is pretty grim in places) the game avoids any references to rape in the story events or plot lines. The Intimacy event by which survivors reproduce explicitly states that 2 consenting survivors be nominated. And despite an expansion which contains a monster with particularly phallic tentacles it resists the urge to go full hentai with rapey tentacle attacks. In fact (ignoring the art for a moment) it's gender politics are actually pretty progressive, there's vitually no difference between male and female characters beyond a chance of death in child birth for the ladies. The art however is definitely divisive and I can well understand how it's a barrier to entry for many. The game is also a brutal RNG a heart and that's not to everyones taste either.

Just backed https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1492106834/aeon-trespass-odyssey/posts/2619413 which looks like it's going for a similar campaign style co-op but with an Ancient Greek theme. They've committed to keeping nudity out of the game and from the look of it they've toned down the body horror elements of KD some too. If you are interested in the campaign and boss battle elements of KD but put off by the art/world then this might be worth a look.

I've played quite a few sessions of KD:M. Apart from the juvenile sensibility, the game itself is just not very good. It relies on random events, which give you little warning of the outcome or control. The battles itself are essentially just dice rolling fests with minimal tactics. The only form of tactic or planning comes in the equipment of your characters and, in the games I played, there were very few options there.

There are many, many better games available at a fraction of the cost.

I've played quite a few sessions of KD:M. Apart from the juvenile sensibility, the game itself is just not very good. It relies on random events, which give you little warning of the outcome or control. The battles itself are essentially just dice rolling fests with minimal tactics. The only form of tactic or planning comes in the equipment of your characters and, in the games I played, there were very few options there.

Can't disagree about the random events but I'd disagree strongly about the battles; positioning and survival expenditure are both critical tactical decisions which can have a huge impact on the outcome. In the early game the battles are a bit of a dice chucking fest as the survivors don't have much gear to provide options or survial to spend. Once survivors have some half decent gear and are facing some of the higher level monsters just running in and hitting with everything you've got is likely to just get you killed faster. Specialising your survivors into different roles is the route to success.

Anyway it's definitely not a game for everyone and it seems I'm in the minority around these parts in liking it.

Can't disagree about the random events but I'd disagree strongly about the battles; positioning and survival expenditure are both critical tactical decisions which can have a huge impact on the outcome. In the early game the battles are a bit of a dice chucking fest as the survivors don't have much gear to provide options or survial to spend. Once survivors have some half decent gear and are facing some of the higher level monsters just running in and hitting with everything you've got is likely to just get you killed faster. Specialising your survivors into different roles is the route to success.

I didn't have the patience or time to get that far! Our group did 6 or 7 evenings of it before the campaign was interrupted. I've tried to resist its return.

I've been playing Blackstone Fortress. By myself. Because I can't leave the house. I get the feeling it is better played with at least one other person, but that's probably just because my first run through is turning out to be quite easy. I like the rules and I love the models, but if I'm stuck playing it alone I'm going to need to come up with ideas to make it more challenging... unless I've just been unusually lucky my first time playing (which is a possibility).

I've not read much of the fluff that comes with it. I kinda like the 40k universe, but do lament how it is lacking that tongue in cheek I thought it used to have back in the 90's. I get worried when I hear the Space Racists described as "the good guys".

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with my first run through of the game and I know I'm going to enjoy coming up with ways to make it more interesting... maybe home-brew some stuff for it.

Oh, I have also been re-creating the old game HeroQuest in paper mini and papercraft form. I played a little of the game over Christmas but coronavirus has scuppered any more gaming sessions. I'm still working on creating all the stuff for the expansions. I'm designing and illustrating everything myself because I want what I make to be usable in other games.